Is mrs an abbreviation for missus?

Answer 1

No. "Missus" is a phonetic spelling of Mrs, which is the abbreviation of "Mistress," the title of a common woman who owns property (just as "Mister" was the title of a common man who owns property). Until recently, women usually acquired property only by marrying a property owner, but some women did own property in their own right, and therefore could be addressed as "Mistress" whether married or not. Nowadays, we use it only for married women.

A title like 'Dr' is called an honorific. We get the abbreviated form of such words by putting together the first and last letters of the word. For example, 'mister' is abbreviated to 'Mr.' because 'm' and 'r' are the first and last letters of the word. Similarly, 'doctor' is reduced to 'Dr'. The same logic, however, doesn't seem to apply to the honorific 'missus'. There is an 'r' in the abbreviated form of the word which doesn't exist in the actual word. This is because 'Mrs' is not the contracted form of 'missus', but 'mistress'! Therefore when you introduce someone as 'Mrs X', what you mean is that she is the mistress of Mr. X. Before you have a fit, let me quickly add that several hundred years ago, 'mistress' was used to refer to both married and unmarried women. With the passage of time, the word was mostly used to refer to someone who was married. The word took on the meaning 'kept woman' much later.

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